A ROUGH ROAD FOR TODAY'S SAMARATANS

C Let's start with James Chappell's story. He and a friend were walking down Main Street a couple of weeks ago, on a Thursday afternoon. They got to the Ancient Burying Ground.

Chappell saw a fight going on in the old cemetery. A man and a woman. He didn't know them.

"He's smacking this girl up and jacking her up on the tombstone. I didn't know if he was beatin' her, robbin' her or whatever," Chappell said.

Some people were watching the fight. Chappell asked what was going on. He was told it was a "husband and wife thing" so he backed off. But the fight got worse and the woman started screaming.

Chappell went up to the woman and said, "Sweetheart, you want this guy to leave you alone?" "Get him off me," the woman screamed. Chapell went toward the tiff and pushed the man back. The man fell and hit his head on the sidewalk. Soon after, Mark DuBois, 32, of Rocky Hill, was pronounced dead at Hartford Hospital.

Chappell, 40, of Bloomfield, an unemployed former soup kitchen worker, was arrested Friday and charged with criminal negligent homicide and assault.

There were a few discrepancies in the eyewitness testimony, but police appear to concur with the main points of Chappell's story.

So, what does this say about being a good samaritan? Wasn't Chappell arrested for doing what he is supposed to do? It's not an easy call.

A couple of states, and several European countries, require members of the general public to come to the aid of people in distress. Connecticut and most other of the United States have no such requirement.

If a person does intervene, he has the same rights as someone defending himself. He can use force, but only the level of force reasonably necessary in the situation.

"Legally, it's a very risky business," said Professor Deborah Calloway, who teaches criminal law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. She said the person who intervenes often needs to make quick judgements, and isn't trained to do so. She has a point. The "good Samaritan laws" offer civil protection to doctors and other medical folk who give emergency help, but that's it.

What is risky legally is also risky physically. I tried to break up a fight once, years ago, and had my right eye swollen shut for a week. Veteran police officers find domestic disputes one of the most dangerous situations they have to face. Hartford police officer Chuck Kelly, one of the best at this difficult business, told me his first step was always to get the parties into separate rooms.

But what about ethics? Are we obliged to step in anyway, and the lawyers be damned? History is replete with examples of nonintervention. In one of the best known, a woman named Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in Kew Gardens, Queens, N.Y., in the 1960s while dozens of people watched. In another, two decades later, a woman was raped on the pool table at Big Dan's Bar in New Bedford before a small crowd.

"More often than not, people fail to intervene when they should," said Michael Rion, former president of the Hartford Seminary and a consultant on ethics and management.

After the much-publicized Genovese incident, a group of legal and ethics scholars at Yale formulated the "Kew Gardens Principles" as a guide to when a bystander ought to intervene in a disturbance.

This theory asks the person to consider the need, the proximity, the capability to act without undue risk to self and whether or not the person is the last resort.

In other words, you're there, it's an emergency, you're able to do something and there's no time to call the police.

If his story holds, Chappell would seem to have an argument under the Kew Garden principles. He tried to be a good Samaritan. That doesn't necessarily exonerate him.

"We're responsible for the acts we cause," said Rion, "but there appear to be mitigating circumstances." What if St. Luke had to write the Samaritan story today? A man would be mugged and left in a ditch. The priest and the Levite would pass by. Then the Samaritan would show up. The man would plead for help.

"Forget it, pal," the Samaritan would say. "I don't want to get involved. They'll have me up on two counts, then there's the possibility of civil liability. What do I look like, a sap?"